superfood dinner

Sweet potato with black bean compote. 

Steamed kale with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice.

It's a superfood dinner.

If you are what you eat, I guess that makes me superwoman.

This is my evening

Home alone. Improvised ratatouille (what's ratatouille if not improvised?). Laura Van den Berg's collection which just arrived from Powell's. The latest Letters in the Mail I have yet to read. And catching up on writing blogs.

The trailer for the new Wuthering Heights movie coming soon to the US. (With the Mumford & Sons song, this trailer gave me chills, in the best way.)

An interesting, synchronistic blog post over at Ploughshares about writing/running/marathoning/novel-ing.

A quiet, cool night to sit in my back yard and listen. Last night I heard coyotes howl. It's nice to feel a sense of wildness even on my patio slab in the middle of suburbia.

making dinner

When I was little, I had visions of being a domestic goddess. Little House on the Prairie style. I couldn't wait to have my own house to clean, my own meals to make, my own garden to tend. I still fantasize sometimes about the garden. But the fact of the matter is, I'm not very good at being domestic. And I'm okay with that. Andrew and I share the cleaning chores, and we delegate the fresh-produce-growing to our local CSA, 180 Degree Farms. 

It's thanks to their hard work that we have fresh, seasonal, local produce every week from April to October. It takes some time to come up with recipes that use the unique ingredients, not to mention the time it takes to prepare meals from scratch. But Andrew's amazing at this. What takes me hours when I've tried, takes him 30 minutes tops and then he comes up with the most delicious, creative meals. He finds recipes and tweaks them to make use of what we have.

Last night's dinner was the best we've had in a while. The menu: burgers and pickles. With a twist, of course. 

(And sorry, I'm not a food blogger, in the sense of writing whole recipes and featuring professional-looking photos. If this dinner sounds good to you, follow the links to the original recipes and make your own variations!)